Business users need to see information related to what they are working on at any point in time. What hinders information workers today is the often-complicated process of locating the right information needed to complete their work. This information is stored in multiple locations and in documents of varying formats—some documents that have been viewed or worked on by a specific user, and some of which other users have worked on. In spite of the promise of business process automation, rich application integration that could bridge these divergent stores and formats is inadequate or nonexistent for small to midsize companies. Core line-of-business (LOB) applications, for example, contain only a portion of the information needed to make a decision, such as associated with approving a purchase order, for example, where the full set of information related to a specific purchase order is stored in other locations and formats such as e-mail, text documents.
In the process of accomplishing work, users currently employ various cumbersome methods to compare, manage, produce, and track information in a constant flow of documents in order to obtain a full and rich view of all the information needed for that work or task. For example, oftentimes, personnel are required to rely on paper copies, tracking lists, tables containing a subset of information, and handwritten notes to track the flow of information from one location or file to another throughout their business processes. The worker searches for information within one application, finds one piece of information in one document, writes it on paper, then switches to another application, finds another piece of information, compares the two, and then decides if the information is related or just similar. The process is manual and prone to error requiring extra effort on the part of the user that is only a work-around to handle the limited, partial or nonexistent connections of information between applications.
Conventional systems are limited because of the lack of correlation and lack of an information model describing the relationships between the sets of data. Today's application display surfaces do all the work to govern the layout, interaction, and behavior of information. Within an individual application, some information describes the relationship of the data within one document to data within another document and the specific set of actions that can be taken on that information. However, there is little or no correlation of data between applications and, if there is correlation, it is usually manually created either through a process defined at design time or by the user at runtime. Even where correlation is made, it is at the full document level, and not for sets of data within a document. Lack of data correlation and efficient presentation thereof places a cognitive burden on the worker and frequently causes the inefficient duplication of effort.